TODD SEAVEY
author of Libertarianism for Beginners and writer of/speaker about many other things

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

45 Thoughts Inspired by Jacob Levy and Rand Paul (Prez #45)

1. Like the rest of you, I’ve spent the past several years
making mocking comments about enemies and rivals on the Internet. But there was
a deeper meaning to my activity even when making brief, dismissive remarks
about longwinded professors or filibustering politicians. (I don’t just want
argument or the rustling of jimmies.)

Truth be told, I’m a
rule utilitarian -- that is, someone who (really) wants everyone to be as
happy as possible and thinks we need a few relatively simple moral and legal
rules to make that happen. As a very left-wing friend of mine once wisely put
it, John Rawls’ Theory of Justice
can’t be the actual set of moral rules we’re supposed to follow because it’s
500 pages long. That’s a joke, but it’s sort of true.

A lot of complex political theorizing must be dispensed with
quickly (perhaps even snidely) if
we’re to keep people focused on the few easily-promulgated ideas that work,
chiefly property rights, which are a radically-decentralized and easily
understood way of settling nearly all political and economic disputes with
clarity. Veer away from strict adherence to that legal rule, and you quickly
get into messy territory in which everyone sounds full of competing metaphysical
and social theories out of Hegel. No good person wants that.

To their credit, though, people do tend to want some sort of
peaceful political compromise most of the time. If people aren’t going to sign
on to strong property rights as that simple conflict-resolution formula, I must
at least partially respect those whose looser political formulas (A) approximate that ideal and (B) seem
similarly rooted in a (broadly) libertarian desire to enable everyone to get
along with each other (as opposed to silencing some in favor of others’ master
plan).

Take, as conflict-resolution-formula examples, the
federalist/constitutionalist conservatism of Rand Paul and the pluralist liberalism of Jacob Levy.

2. I’m delighted to see Rand Paul formally announce his
candidacy for president at noon today
in Kentucky (though that linked video from yesterday has a bit more fat,
sunburn, and cultish chanting than I might have used if I had edited it). His
efforts to blend libertarian and conservative thinking with outreach to the
left confuses some but seems to me quite in keeping with his father’s use of
constitutional, states’-rights thinking as a means of settling deeply divisive
arguments in America in a civil, freedom-respecting fashion.

I don’t think young libertarians (delighted as I am by their
growing numbers) really appreciate how unprecedented it is to have someone as
libertarian as Rand Paul as close to presidential electoral success as he now
appears to be, whether he ultimately prevails or not. This is not an
opportunity to be lightly dismissed.

I can understand people avoiding all entanglement with the evil realm of electoral politics, but I’m
baffled, really, by how anyone can intensely dislike Rand Paul while loving Ron
Paul. No one ever seems to give
me a good answer, merely pointing out some tiny flaw of Rand’s (usually falling
in any area that many minarchist libertarians would consider a moral grey area
anyway) that often as not was even more
trueof Ron. They tolerated Ron
holding office, supporting Israel’s strike against emerging nuclear facilities
in a nearby country back in 1980, voting to authorize the Afghanistan war in
2001, working with more moderate political allies in Congress, occasionally
voting for the best available (least-statist) of several competing bills, and
so on. Why are all these things monstrous when Rand does them?

And Rand does them without wandering off into conspiracy
theories or dizzying run-on sentences about banking.

I mean, he’s far from perfect -- he’s a politician, for one
thing -- but in the current context, I think he’s clearly our best bet (as does Cato’s
David Boaz). Sit out the whole process if you like, but I question whether
anyone backing any other major-party candidate is serious about radically
shrinking government and expanding freedom. (And as a strategic sidenote, I’ll
repeat something I said about the elder Paul’s 2012 run: If and only if the Republicans nominate
Paul, then Gary Johnson, who keep in mind is no anarcho-capitalist himself,
should suspend his Libertarian Party campaign.)

4. I’m amused by the unusual length of what is apparently Rand
Paul’s official campaign slogan:

Defeat the
Washington machine. Unleash the American dream.

It’s got a certain poetry. Bit more badass than “Hope,
Growth, and Opportunity.”

And, hey, he’s got J.C. Wattsin
his corner, which may help with his ongoing black-outreach thing.

5. I wish ethnic calculations didn’t matter at all, but
clearly they do when crunching vote totals. The Hispanic ties of Jeb Bush,
Rubio, and Cruz -- even Romney -- have clearly been an implicit part of their
resumes, which is not unreasonable. After all, we now live in a country where a
friend of mine just this weekend overheard a woman describe her daughter
being bullied for not speaking Spanish and being told by teachers that until she learns Spanish she should expect to be
bullied.

6. We must come to grips with multiculturalism and
pluralism. That’s where the two books of Jacob Levy come in, respectively. The
second, just out, is Rationalism,
Pluralism, and Freedom, and it’s great.

There are many different ways of carving up the political
realm (I hesitate to say “spectrum,” since that’s most definitely one specific
model and perhaps a tired one). I’ve long known, roughly since we were
undergrads twenty-six years ago, that Jacob’s not fighting the usual right
vs. left battle, but neither is he fighting the usual individualism vs. state
battle that occupies libertarians and socialists alike.

His liberalism is a middle way, not only within the usual American
spectrum but within the history of liberalism itself (in the broad sense that
includes both individualist classical liberalism and modern statist
liberalism), conceptually if not necessarily in terms of any specific policy
recommendations. Like Vartan Gregorian, the man who was president of Brown when
Jacob and I were there -- and like no small number of Burkeans and even
paleoconservatives, though Jacob might not want to be associated with them --
he admires de Tocqueville and emphasizes civil society’s intermediary
institutions (from churches to universities to bird-watching societies, those
entities that are neither individualist nor statist).

He describes both
the methodological individualists (like most libertarians including me) and the
statists as rationalists but thinks
(like many academic left-liberals) there’s a neglected strain of liberal pluralists in intellectual history who
have more to teach us about how multiple sets of lawlike customs can coexist.
(There’s some similarity here to anarchist David Friedman’s online
book-in-progress Law Codes Very Different
from Our Own, which surveys gypsy, Amish, and other rule sets.)

Jacob is describing the European experience, he says, not
that of the U.S. or other parts of the world, but there is an unmistakable
resemblance to the letter he wrote to Liberty
magazine over twenty years ago reminding me not to be too dismissive about the
Amish, and indeed I’ve come to see them as a model of practical anarchism
regardless of their conscious philosophy. The Constitution, and American
liberty in general, can be thought of more as a truce, he told me, than as a perfected rational philosophy. Aiming
for the latter may be asking too much.

If boosting the left or right is a doomed proposition
because of their co-dependent relationship in which each move by one causes a
countermove from the other side, perhaps (depressingly) the same is true of the
classical liberal/modern liberal tension (individual vs. state). A way out of
the bind may be needed: pluralist liberalism as a path between the
individualist-rationalists and the statist-rationalists. As a practical
strategic matter, it might well be so, even if that’s still a messy, not
tidily-resolvable path by the abstract standards of philosophy.

I still think real individualist philosophy --
methodological individualism and Austrian economics -- has barely been tried
(despite all the hate already directed at it by the left). In my experience, it
catches on rather well when explained to people without compromises and mushy add-ons, and it achieves wonders on
the even rarer occasions it’s implemented. We should at least give that a more
serious try, I think. But Jacob offers a far less-statist route than the currently
dominant crop of liberals.

Liberalism has
a real history, though, not just
abstract theories, and even traditionalists may be surprised how much they
enjoy seeing Rationalism, Pluralism, and
Freedom weave important lessons from that centuries-long conversation and
the real social conflicts that produced it and shape it even today.

7. As an aside of particular personal interest, I must say
Jacob’s main argument against pure anarcho-capitalism (or Nozickian pure
liberalism, as he frames it) is a pragmatic yet hypothetical one: What if
you’re stuck in a world where all land is claimed by groups with strict customs
to which you must adhere, and the best you can hope for is to choose among
those groups? How is that individual freedom?

Fair enough, but as a rule utilitarian, I must ask: what if
popularizing theories other than
anarcho-capitalism is the fastest way to create a world in which people are
routinely stuck in restrictive rule-making groups that claim all surrounding
land and don’t like to sell it or allow for individual diversity? That seems
far more likely to me. (Even in an unlikely world of vast, inescapable, repressive
anarcho-capitalist compounds, though, we could presumably pursue some small Georgist
fix such as limiting the ownership of land in emergencies rather than go the
more intrusive route of telling people on a given parcel of land how to live or
what forms of autonomy and personhood they must foster.)

The impure
capitalist theories may thereby be more self-refuting in practice than is the pure theory, which is so rarely even
spoken aloud. The pure theory may confront difficult hypotheticals in extreme
cases, but the impure theories are already causing disaster in reality.

8. By my atheist-anarchist lights, the worst-case scenario
philosophically, though, is the theist-socialist. Having recently come out as
super-Christian hasn’t made the ludicrous Ana
Marie Cox averse to using
force against her fellow Christians for left-liberal ends, for instance.

9. There are, I will admit though, extreme cases in which
private action borders on state-like coercion, as a recent documentary and this
old article argue is the case with Scientology. But does either the
anarcho-capitalist or the Levyan pluralist really have reason to single out
Scientology for criticism among all the other restrictive religions and cults?
Short of assault and fraud, we largely have to let people do what they want.

10. The first person Jacob footnotes is Larry Siedentop,
who I
blogged about last time -- and who earnestly pushes that (rationalist)
individual-and-state model in his book despite, ironically, dealing almost
exclusively with intermediary church institutions in his analysis. But Jacob
has learned from an array of influences without necessarily endorsing
everything they say and also thanks people like MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry. He’s
a peacemaker and bridge-builder.

11. By contrast, the once-useful Southern Poverty Law Center
has become an antagonistic, alarmist joke and instead of defending blacks
against oppression is now reduced to calling black doctor and Presidential
Medal of Freedom recipient Ben Carson an extremist threat. I think we’ll
survive him, SPLC.

12. The Indianapolis
Star front pages seen nearby, from forty years apart, are a reminder
(h/t Mollie Hemingway) how far we’ve fallen from protecting basic liberty to
imposing a left-liberal cultural agenda.

13. For good or ill, Jacob might more or less agree with
both headlines, though. Witness the nuance in his
take on the whole Indiana gay legal fracas. He’ll irk many hardcore
libertarians, in this case managing to endorse anti-discrimination laws
and the morass of common law on the meaning of “public accommodation” even as
he condemns the Indiana law as ugly, redundant, and purely symbolic all at the
same time. Yet that’s consistent with the cautious view in his new book that
principles are derived from the thicket of history instead of standing wholly
outside that thicket.

I would often prefer philosophers to stand outside history
shouting “Wrong!” Admittedly, political science professors have a different
function and way of approaching problems than (often simplistic) pure
philosophers -- but my basic objection to the political scientists’ usual
approach is that no one but professors and lawyers has time for all those
details. Saying so isn’t anti-intellectualism. It’s a (mildly but realistically
populist) recognition that the experts will take over and centralize decision-making
if no one else can follow the conversation.

15. And the current perpetually-outraged left, unlike, say,
right-wing pizza-sellers, are not just
acting like opinionated customers in the market. They are urging state action
and knowing they’re likely to get it (they already have, meaning that this
whole “Indiana Law” venture, started by religious conservatives, is basically
going to end up making it harder to
discriminate legally in Indiana than it was before all this began).

If, as Jacob himself has argued, Jim Crow was pernicious in
part because it so thoroughly entwined public and private authoritarianism, the
same is true of the mounting collaboration between the government and the
cultural left in our own day. It is the left, not the right, that is
pushing things farther and farther toward open violent confrontation in the
streets instead of voluntary pluralism.

17. Liberalism changes over time. The Economist changes, too, alas, with former Party of European
Socialists intern and Marxist literature major Jeremy Cliffe, who
narrated a TV show saying we should take Russell Brand seriously, becoming the
new Bagehot columnist (h/t J’Lien Sorbo and Guy Fawkes’ Blog).

I am reminded of sitting at the Economist table at a Reason event and realizing only one member of
the Economist group was a
laissez-faire advocate and the others thought he was a funny relic (and catch me in politically-mixed company again
onstage April 18 at 6pm (not 7!!) at the PIT in one of their Electoral Dysfunction
panels, 123 E. 24th!).

18. I fear this new Bagehot columnist will not do, say,
interviews that embarrass the Green Party prime minister candidate the
way this
one does (h/t J'Lien Sorbo). If you can bear to hear 3min 42sec of the most
painfully awkward political interview in history, that’s a typically snide UK
interviewer effortlessly destroying a completely flustered Green Party
candidate for prime minister who admits she hasn’t done the math(s) on public
housing costs, despite it being central to her platform. Brutal.

19. Back in the U.S., though, I wonder sometimes amid
overblown battles about race and abortion, on Twitter and occasionally even in
reality: do modern liberals today consider it more urgent in the days
ahead to fight the battles they won decisively fifty years ago or the battles
they won decisively forty years ago? If you see what I mean.

20. Speaking of Twitter, I predict Trevor Noah will
in fact cave under criticism and mute his offensive comedy. He joked in a
recent stand-up routine (h/t J’Lien Sorbo) about how Charlie Hebdo basically
had it coming, so while he’s stupid and offensive, he’s not the champion of
free speech that Patton Oswalt is. He’ll do what the left wants. Alas,
Voltaire, etc., etc.

21. Society has become so leftist-hypersensitive so quickly
that there is now a controversy raging within the comedian community because one of their own made a joke about
another comedian (who herself does a lot of low humor) being a fat woman with
one arm. Think about that: COMEDIANS ARE HANDWRINGING (those that have two
hands) over COMEDIANS joking about OTHER COMEDIANS and about THE “COMEDIAN
COMMUNITY” NOT STEPPING IN FAST ENOUGH TO CRITICIZE IT. That’s how fucking
sensitive the idiot-crybabies composing this society have become.

23. Anyone who claims not to see how government regulation,
p.c., terrorism, and the police state all encourage each other now, slowly
melding in an overall presumption against liberty and thought, is either
very naive, very ideological, or insane. I have rarely been more pessimistic about
the culture in my adult lifetime.

28. I don’t know if the dwarf-tossing jokes in the Lord of
the Rings movies were appropriate, but my complaints would be more
comedy-driven than offense-driven. If they were going to do awkward references
to current-day culture, though (something Tolkien himself was not entirely
above -- note his golf jokes in The
Hobbit), one I would like to have heard is Gandalf saying, “The Ents speak
in low tones, always a powerful bass. You should hear an Ent whistle.”

29. That crossed my mind while watching the cool documentary
Lampert and Stamp about the Who’s managers, which ends up being
a very intimate look at the early band as well. It also made me realize
Townshend’s reason for saying elsewhere that he dislikes Zeppelin: They nearly
stole Moon and Entwistle! Small world. (And Stamp is the brother of Gen. Zod, I
now know.)

30. Far from ours being a hopelessly patriarchal world that
silences female voices, I could
probably turn anything with tits and a political opinion into a successful
pundit. You have no idea how desperate and eager TV is for women. But believe
what you like.

31. Meanwhile, it sounds like Mindy Kaling’s brotherought
to make a fact-based mildly conservative comedy film called Oversoul Man.

32. As one very wise friend of mine put it, if X-Men were
real life, much as everyone loves its liberal metaphor for oppression, we
wouldn’t see Sentinels hunting down mutants, we’d see people saying it’s time
for Supreme Court Justice Ororo Monroe.

34. This look at the campus left is not
a bad summary of the current
situation (and colleges, alas, tend to be a model for the future).

35. But I have not forgotten that more moderate figures like
Michael Bloomberg can do even
more damage (don't help him, Boris!!). They more easily rally a consensus
and perform bipartisan mischief. Everyone is terrible, really.

37. In the modern world, by contrast, do liberals actually
believe this nightmare
scene will occur with any frequency? (And what church does the
gentle-sounding yet resolutely racist
old man belong to anyway?)

38. I mean, sure, it’s something that could happen once in a while, sort of like these five minutes of
clips from Night of the Lepus
(h/t Franklin Harris).

40. I read Grant Morrison’s Ultra Comics #1, in which
a central character pleads with the reader to stop turning the pages because
the story itself is evil and must not be completed, and I’m pleased to see
multiple people online voicing my suspicion -- that Morrison at some point read
the terrifying Grover-from-Sesame-Street
book The Monster at the End of This Book.

Jacob similarly joked about Hegel being the monster at the
end of his book.

41. Immigration
is crucial to Jacob’s thinking, I now understand, in part because it’s vital to
avoiding that trapped-in-enclaves effect that would make anarcho-capitalism
become creepy. I see NYC, for its part, might give a million non-citizens the
right to vote. Frightening! We could end up with a communist mayor who
honeymooned in Cuba. Oh…right. Never mind. Same dif.

42. Wariness of abstract model societies makes Jacob
admirably averse to most formulations of “social justice,” and from the ButtHurt Libertarians
page comes a scary reminder of what Atlas
Shrugged might sound like if Ayn Rand had believed in so-called social
justice:

“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his
shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees
buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the
last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore
down upon his shoulders -- what would you tell him?”

44. And in a simple reminder of the clash between modern
fragmentation and the echoes of the old paterfamilias
that Siedentop describes: an emotional farewell, one of the most memorable
scenes in TV history, from All in the
Family (h/t Mark Judge).

45. All of the tensions described above, much as we may
fight about them, are trivial, of course, compared to some of the
life-or-hellfire battles of the Middle
Ages -- and we’ll look at those next time in the form of the new book Medieval
Heresies by Christine Caldwell Ames.